The Associated Press’s most recent story on the controversial Starbucks USA Today “Race Together” campaign came out Wednesday evening.

In that story, AP Food Industry Writer Candice Choi quoted Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz at his company’s annual shareholders’ meeting predicting that “Some in the media will criticize Starbucks for having a political agenda,” but that “Our intentions are pure.” Perhaps they are, but I suspect that certain materials company and USA Today have produced in connection with the campaign won’t pass any readers’ “pure intentions” test. Take USA Today’s “How Much of What You Know About Race Is True?” test. Full contents follow the jump.

From an emailer, responding to a plea for money from Arizona’s senior senator, throwing words contained therein back at him (bolds are mine):

(John) McCain is not the only voice of surrender. Referring to a TEMPORARY stay against the implementation of Obama’s Amnesty Decree that was recently issued by a federal judge, Senator Jeff Flake proclaimed: “Why don’t we just… declare victory and move on?”

Senator Lindsey Graham chimed in: “When the judge ruled, that was the way I wanted to end it.”

And Congressman Peter King went so far as to say that people who actually value the Constitution and who do NOT want Obama’s Unconstitutional Amnesty Decree funded are “absolutely irresponsible” and “have no concept of reality.”

McCain, Flake, Graham and King are advocating what is being called the “escape hatch theory” in Washington. It goes something like this… “Look, the courts have delayed Mr. Obama’s unconstitutional actions for now, so let’s just go ahead and fund those unconstitutional actions… since we really want amnesty to pass anyway… and when the dust clears, we’ll blame the courts for the evisceration of our Constitution.”

You can almost hear them chuckle.

But wait just a minute: Now that a federal judge has placed a temporary hold on Mr. Obama’s unconstitutional decree… is that not a reason why Congress SHOULD NOT fund it? Would logic not dictate that Congress wait for the courts to reach a final decision BEFORE funding Mr. Obama’s lawless amnesty decree?

Sorry gentlemen, but a TEMPORARY stay by a federal judge is not a “victory” and it’s not an excuse or an escape hatch that ALLOWS you to fund Mr. Obama’s unconstitutional amnesty decree. Rather, it’s the reason why you SHOULD NOT fund Mr. Obama’s unconstitutional amnesty decree.

We’re not that stupid, Sens. McCain, Graham and Flake.

As to Rep. King, the “reality” is that you, sir, are the one who is being “irresponsible.”

Speaking of money, isn’t it amazing how the GOP can come up with significant funds almost instantly to attack its own true conservative members but never, ever, ever consistently spends the kind of money needed to go after the Obama administration and the left and around the press?

The harsh truth was delivered in an open letter to Fox News’s Bret Baier, who consdiers Kasich a center-right Republican politician, by Mike Snead, Dayton TEA Party President. It reflects his personal views.

At Business Week, reporter James G. Neuger was really upset on Thursday that concerned politicians were raising the issue of protecting the public against radical Islamists in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

Of course, he couldn’t resist chalking it up to bigotry — against “immigrants — especially those with veils, turbans and non-white skin.” Excerpts follow the jump.

Call the Ripley’s Believe It or Not people. Have smelling salts available. What follows will surely be one of the more unusual things you’ve seen or heard this year.

In the midst of his otherwise odious Silicon Valley race-hustling shakedown effort, Jesse Jackson said something that made sense — so much sense that the rest of the press, which usually hangs on every word of his nonsensical pronouncements, has virtually ignored it, and will probably continue to.

Earlier tonight, Curtis Houck at NewsBusters observed that the Tuesday evening network news shows failed to report on an opinion issued today by a federal judge in Western Pennsylvania in connection with President Obama’s illegal immigration-related executive actions last month.

Several blogs and center-right outlets noted Judge Arthur Schwab’s 38-page “Memorandum Opinion” this afternoon. Not that this excuses the networks, but a search at the Associated Press’s national site just before 8 p.m. on Schwab’s last name (unfortunately not saved) returned nothing relevant. But shortly after 8 p.m. a story with a time stamp of 5:08 p.m. with Schwab’s name finally showed up in the same search. Only the AP can explain how this could have happened.

Earlier today, according to several center-right and zero establishment press outlets thus far (based on an appropriate Google News search done just before 5 PM ET), White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said that President Obama was only speaking “colloquially” when he told hecklers in an audience in Chicago last week that “I took action to change the law” in his November 20 announcement on immigration.

While it is indeed nice that the Associated Press did a fact check on President Obama’s Thursday night immigration address — an item P.J. Gladnick at NewsBusters covered on Saturday — it would have been even nicer if the wire service better described as the Administration’s Press had fact-checked Julie Pace’s and Josh Lederman’s awful Friday evening backgrounder on the speech.

The AP pair couldn’t even get through their first three paragraphs without distorting beyond repair their presentation of allegedly “soaring deportations.”

Demonstrating that serving as the Palace Guard for Dear Leader is a 24-7-365 enterprise, Zachary A. Goldfarb, policy editor at The Washington Post, somehow felt the need on Sunday morning to critique the Saturday Night Live opening skit which appeared two nights ago.

Twelve hours after the skit was first broadcast, Goldfarb, whose whose full archive going back to August indicates that he has not written a WaPo item for Sunday publication in the past four months, nitpicked a comedy skit for — oh the humanity! — failing to distinguish between an “Executive Order” and “executive action” (bolds are mine):

At CNN on Thursday night, Anderson Cooper asked former White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, who is now a contributor at the network, to square President Barack Obama’s Thursday night immigration announcement with past presidential statements that he didn’t have the power to do what he had just done.

Through a maze of statutes and regulations, aliens granted deferred action or parole in place will be eligible for many public benefits. This is true even though they are still illegal aliens. To summarize:

Aliens with parole for less than a year are eligible for Obamacare, Social Security, EITC, Unemployment, and Medicare (with sufficient authorized work history). Paroled aliens, whether for less than a year or greater, who are children and pregnant women are also eligible for health care benefits through Medicaid and SCHIP in states that have opted to cover them.

Aliens with parole for more than a year retain their eligibility for Obamacare, Social Security, EITC, Unemployment, and Medicare. If they are children or pregnant women, they are also eligible for health care benefits through Medicaid and SCHIP in states that have opted to cover them. Finally, because paroled aliens become qualified aliens after a year, paroled aliens become eligible for all federal public benefits after 6 years, including SCHIP and TANF.

Finally, aliens with deferred action are eligible for Obamacare, Social Security, EITC, Unemployment, Medicare (with sufficient authorized work history). If they are children and pregnant women, they are also eligible for health care benefits through Medicaid and SCHIP in states that have opted to cover them.

Even if this was a good idea — and it most emphatically isn’t, for reasons which would take up a book — a government running serious deficits as far as the eye can see and long-term unfunded liabilities approaching and perhaps by now exceeding $100 trillion can’t even begin to afford this.

Late Friday afternoon, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and Republicans in Washington got their first taste of what they will likely see from the supposedly “objective” reporters at the Associated Press, aka the Administration’s Press, as they cover their relationship with President Obama and his White House apparatachiks during the next two years.

The headline at a story by Nedra Pickler and Erica Wener (“Immigration dispute erupts at White House lunch”) and that story’s first seven words (“A White House lunch aiming for cooperation”) are fundamentally dishonest and untrue, respectively. The article’s later text proves both of my contentions.

The left’s behavior in the months leading up to this year’s midterm elections reveals far more than mere anxiety about their results.

There is real concern that they might be losing their grip on African-Americans, their most reliable constituency.

They should be worried. African-Americans who, more than any other group, were promised “hope and change” in 2008 have seen plenty of reasons to lose hope, because the changes seen during Barack Obama’s first six years have done them serious harm.

Democrats have gotten used to counting on well over 90 percent of blacks voting in their favor. If that figure had come down to even 75 percent in the 2012 presidential election with those abandoning ship voting for Mitt Romney, Barack Obama’s 3.5 million popular-vote margin would have vanished.

One activist recently lamented that blacks “think the president is a savior.” Well, that’s what many blacks believe they were promised. This lady clearly thought so six years ago:

The guess here is that the woman interviewed still has to worry about putting gas in her car. Even after the recent fall in prices, it’s still almost twice as much per gallon as it was in late 2008.

Actually, to my surprise and surely the left’s chagrin, my guess was right. It turns out that in July 2014, the once euphoric Peggy Joseph was very disappointed in what had since transpired:

“(The) mortgage got worse and gas prices got higher.”

“During that time, we needed a change. But a change for the better, not for the worse.”

…

“The man behind the curtain is not who we thought or expected him to be.”

The black community’s suffering is deeply baked into the economic numbers.

Black employment per the government’s Household Survey has increased by 1.4 million since the recession officially ended in June 2009. The good news ends there. Unfortunately, analysts at Sentier Research, working with Census Bureau data, tell us that during that same period, black household income fell sharply, and by far more than in any other ethnic group:

Looking at household wealth, “virtually no progress has been made” in narrowing racial disparities. On average, almost everyone is poorer, and those who were poor already with less to lose have been hardest hit.

Speaking of being poor, the African-American poverty rate in 2013 was 27.2 percent. That’s a 2.5-point increase since 2008, and 1.4 points since 2009. At 12.3 percent, the white poverty rate in 2013 was less than half that of blacks, and had fallen to where it was in 2009.

It has long since become obvious that the left can’t credibly argue that their policies have provided African-Americans any kind of tangible economic benefit. This has forced them to resort to the politics of perpetual outrage.

This explains why the race-baiting industry, with fundamentally dishonest establishment press assistance, tried — and spectacularly failed on substance — to make a national case out of Trayvon Martin. It explains why they have turned Ferguson, Missouri into a virtual urban battleground. That effort, primarily an attempt to railroad a cop who was by most accounts defending himself against his attacker instead of letting the attacker kill him, also appears to be on track to fail.

The need for perpetual outrage also explains why the Obama administration continues to litigate against requiring identification to vote and to cast anyone who dares oppose them as presumptively racist. If anything, identification requirements aren’t strong enough, given recent evidence that tens or even hundreds of thousands of non-citizens are illegally voting.

But the merits of their bogus attempts at prosecution or their legal arguments really don’t matter. Only fanning the outrage does.

By their actions, the left is betraying its belief that the only way to keep African-Americans in a failed economy marching in lockstep on the liberal plantation is to deliver a continuous stream of disinformation supposedly showing that the system is irretrievably stacked against them.

Just wait until the plantation’s inhabitants figure out that the people doing the stacking are the very people who pose as their best friends.

Most people believe that President Obama’s deferral of unilateral — and unconstitutional — executive action on immigration was done to avoid a serious backlash in the midterm elections. I believe that it was primarily a targeted decision.

Allowing the euphemism known as “a path to legal status for millions of undocumented workers” will suddenly create a tidal wave of competition for low-paying jobs at law-abiding employers. Disproportionately low-skilled African-Americans are already having a hard enough time finding jobs. A much fiercer fight for low-paying jobs will keep wages depressed. If the Obama administration were to somehow get its way and enact a $10.10 per hour minimum wage, that would only leave more disgruntled job seekers on the sidelines.

I believe that Obama’s immigration deferral was largely done to keep black voters on the plantation this time around, and to buy Democrats some time to figure out how to brainwash those they are shafting. As a result, the party will probably keep or win a few House, Senate and gubernatorial elections which are currently too close to call but would have become certain losses without the immigration deferral.

Once Obama opens the immigration floodgates, the chances of a serious backlash in the black community, which has already endured so much and received so little in return, are far from small.

I sense an historic opportunity here to open up African-Americans’ hearts and minds. Are sensible, free-market, compassionate conservatives up to the challenge?

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